


Kintsugi Children

by esmiedo



Series: Kintsugi [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: AU, AU - compliant, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Compliant, Gen, alternate universe - compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2018-12-17 22:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11861223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esmiedo/pseuds/esmiedo
Summary: If there is beauty in the unlucky then they are breathtakingly gorgeous.





	1. Monotony

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also on FF.net. What do you guys think of Ku and Ro?  
> Overall disclaimer for all chapters: I do not own Naruto

There is a tradition called Kintsugi, it is the practice of taking broken pottery and repairing it with a lacquer mixed with powdered precious metals. It is reminiscent of the philosophy wabi-sabi which embraces imperfection, impurity.

At the end of the day behind the beauty of a golden spider web there will always be a broken bowl.

It is ultimately what they were; a broken bowl among the roots thought grand only because of an old man's Kintsugi.

From the beginning, they were together. Born together, mirror images of one another tiny hands held and eyes unfocused. They screamed in the same desperate way, the sort of cry you hear from the mouths of dying men. Each movement they made was in echoes of one another, a response to the ripples their other half made. It was never I or me in their thoughts, only we, for it was all they ever knew.

They didn't mind.

They slept curled into one another, heads bowed and their dreams shared, trying to fix the seams they could feel pulling between them. They traced each other's features and babbled their own language in tandem, verbatim. Each breathe every morning was shared as they laid blinking like dolls, so very blank like them too. One was never far behind the other. They were two unbalanced forces reacting on each other, forcing movement and transferring energy so that if one spoke their first word, a mockery of that spoken to them, then the other would soon follow. When one began to crawl, they pulled their other half behind them, dragging them along.

The moment their legs no longer wavered they began training. They stood side by side, shoulders pressed and fingers intertwined. The man before them was still with eyes neither half lidded nor wide, a mouth titled neither up nor down. He was blank and they were cold. He introduced their first crack, he snapped and took the two halves of the bowl and repurposed them.

He called them "you" and "girl," they only knew they had bent and shifted their tired tired bodies just right when he turned his pale flat eyes away from them to demonstrate another. They liked it best when he wasn't watching.

_"What is our name?" one whispered into the dark of their room her face pressed against the collarbone of her sister._

_There was a pause, and for a moment she thought maybe she had misjudged and her sister was asleep after all._

_"I can't remember." How tragic._

And oh, they learned so very quickly there among the roots. The world there was surreal for them, echoing yet so muffled. The slightest noise spreading throughout the hallways and rooms. Everything was said, nothing was said, they knew where they stood and were silent. It was there in those rooms that they sometimes felt heavy, their limbs unwieldy dragging sluggishly through the air, maybe they were coming to terms. They pushed through, they had too, for they were always watched.

"Your stance is sloppy." The strike was harsh on her skin and she let out a soft gasp. She didn't see him move. Her sister watched, holding her own stance with worried eyes. They knew if she moved to her side that it would just make everything worse, their trainers were never kind. They could never forget how the others watched. She quickly forced herself up again, stumbling slightly before sliding back into the stance stilling under his watchful eyes.

Tension, they supposed that is what you could call it. Whatever it was it made it so hard to breathe, to keep moving through it all and keep up with their training. It felt like they were in quicksand, sinking and sinking the more the struggled until they were living underwater.

_"How do we know what it's like to live underwater?" one girl circled another, the sand in her hand sliding out with each arc and flick she made giving birth so a flat design with little definition. They thought it an apt description for themselves._

_"I don't think we really do," said the other as she laid sprawled on her back counting the cracks in the rocks above their head, "but maybe we remember."_

_The sand stopped, a hand outstretched, "It's wrong, we feel so very wrong."_

_"I know." And they were still, watching and waiting for something, anything in a world beneath the waves._

Another aspect of their training was not truly formal, they knew their trainer didn't go out of their way to teach them, but still they learned how to survive, to be silent, to observe. Their trainer gave them their foundation, he taught them to twist and weave, how to scale walls and shatter rocks with a flick of their hands. There was so much and yet so little, and all they ever knew. They took it and fit it into their arsenal like Kunai and Senbon, one would be flexible and wild the other a fixed point for her to return. They learned and learned and learned but it never seemed to be enough for the others. They learned to be sharp, to embrace the chill in their veins. They were passed from trainer to trainer, like wild dogs forced into domestication, bred and bled to perfection.

There was a man who watched them on occasion, he was strange in the wake of the blank faces they knew. He was a tall man, or maybe they were just small, he watched them through narrowed eyes and dusted skin. They thought they might have known his face once.

_"Do you think he is our father?" one asked as she stared at her sister tracing the lines of her face._

_"Does it matter?" The other responded, they both knew it didn't. He wasn't there to save them._

They didn't know fear, he made sure of that, but they think if they could he would be the thing they feared most. He broke them, they knew that much, he took them from the moment they faced the world and changed them until there was only obedience and loyalty to him.

They hadn't been a person for a very, very long time.

Did he know, they wondered, that there is a risk, always a risk, when breaking things.

You can never predict how something will break after all. Will it shatter? Will it chip? Will it crumble? Horizontal, vertical, out from the center or from the side. Where are they weakest?

And so, they learned how to break, they learned how to break others in so many ways. In the body, it's at the joints. It takes too much energy to waste to break a bone when you could do just as well with a joint after all.

Or the neck, everything is awfully fragile there after all.

The mind was their favorite to break. It's in shining eyes, wide and rabid, with teeth bared in despair they learned how to feel. It wasn't bad, it was horrible and they knew and they mourned.

Candles for the dead and dying.

_"I can't sleep." One hissed to her sister pressing cold hands to the others faces as she loomed above her._

_"Why?" the other sighed pushing her hand away._

_"Does it matter?"_

_"I suppose not." Hands blindly reached out in search of the other, "what do you want me to do about it?"_

_"Tell me a story." She finally fell to her side curling herself against her sister smiling against the skin she could feel._

_"You know them all"_

_"You remember them better."_

_"What of the Scorpion and the Frog?" there was silence for a moment, it dragged on and on in the dark feeling like centuries rather than seconds._

_"Well?" they had forgotten they could speak, the voice of one was jarring for them both._

_"I was hoping you fell asleep. There once was a Scorpion, he lived in a burrow-"_

_"Do scorpions live in burrows?"_

_"Do you want me to stop?"_

_"No."_

_"There was once a Scorpion who lived in a **burrow** ," she paused narrowing her eyes as if daring her sister to interrupt her again, "near a human village. Day in and day out the sun would set in the desert and he left his little home hunting for his food, skittering his many legs from place to place. He lived like this for many years, unchanging from one moment to another drowning in the monotony."_

_"Where is the frog?"_

_"What did I just say?"_

_"Sorry, sorry."_

_"The Scorpion lived his life until suddenly, one day he felt an inch. It was different and strange and he was afraid unused to something so different so he killed himself to be done with it. The end."_

_"That's not how it goes."_

_"I thought you didn't know?"_

_"Stop pouting and tell it right. Please?"_

_"The Scorpion unfortunately did not kill himself and instead pretended he didn't feel the itch. He continued on in his life until one night he ventured further out from his burrow. oh, thought the scorpion, maybe if I go a bit further this incessant feeling will go away. And so he did, the Scorpion walked and walked pausing only to eat and sleep feeling so very happy with this new change. He passed through forests and over mountains, through rain and snow traveling for miles and miles until he came to a river. The river was wide and the rapids rough, he knew he could not cross it alone and so he despaired. What ever shall I do, thought the Scorpion, I have traveled so far and now I must stop?"_

_"Why doesn't he go around?"_

_"He is a Scorpion do you really expect him to have thought of that?"_

_"Fair enough."_

_"The Scorpion heard a distinct splashing noise that drew him from his thoughts and there in the river was a Frog." She paused as her sister shimmied closer to her in excitement pressing her cheek against her sister's arm, "The Frog leaped and swam through the water twisting and spinning with glee._

_'Hello?' called out the Scorpion to the Frog, 'Excuse me Frog.'_

_'Yes?' Said the Frog to the Scorpion as he turned to swimming closer, remaining a safe distance from the other's pincers and tail._

_'Oh, Frog, I have traveled far and long from my home and cannot cross the River. It would mean a great deal to me if you would be so kind as to let me ride on your back to the other side.' The Scorpion tried, his voice soft and his legs sinking miserably into the mud of the river bank. But the Frog had heard of other scorpions, he knew the tales his brothers had told of their deceit and sting._

_'How do I know you will not sting me if I let you upon my back.' The Frog said simply, nodding his head to himself._

_'Because, Frog, if I do I will die soon after.' The Frog things for a moment, sees no flaw in the Scorpion's logic and so he swims up near the water's edge to let the Scorpion crawl onto his back. They set out across the river soon after, the Frog mindful of his passenger. When they had reached the middle of the river the Frog felt a sharp pain in his side. As they both begin to sink beneath the rapids he turns to the Scorpion on his back and gasped 'Why have you stung me Scorpion? Now we both will surely drown.' and so replied the Scorpion 'I cannot help it, Frog, for it is my nature."_

_"A scorpion will always do what is in its nature."_

_"Go to sleep."_

Their first mission was simple, outfitted with blank blank masks to go over their blank blank faces they were sent out from the roots.

  
They knew many things. They knew they shouldn't stop, they knew they couldn't stare, they had a mission but they wish they could. They knew they were small, but leaping through the trees they realized just how small they really were.

It took five days to reach the land of birds, Northwest of Konoha through the rains of Ame do not stop.

It was so very strange.

It took another two to watch their mark, to study everything like they were taught. An hour to steal the scroll, five fell, and homeward they were again. It only took four days this time to reach the entrance for root, just off Konoha's east wall three steps from the hallow tree. They never thought they would find sanctuary in that place.

But they did, oh, they did.

Their seal thrummed and back under the earth they went, hiding from the ghosts that followed them home. They settled kneeling before the man who made his own Kintsugi art among the children of the roots.

_"Did we have to kill those guards?" one whispered to another_

_"Quiet, they may hear." They were silent, waiting for monsters to come for them in the dark for the thoughts they could not stop. It never came. "He wanted them to know, he wanted them to know it was taken"_

_"Why?" they laid there staring sightlessly at one another for a moment._

_"Does it matter?" another pause filled with the soft sounds of their breathing. "War. I believe we are at war and he wants them to know."_

_"Know what?"_

_"I don't know." They both already knew._

In this world, there are very few absolutes. Those who lived here liked to pretend there were but there were even fewer beneath the leaves of this tree. You may never find love, you may never succeed, you may never be who you wish you could be, and yet in the end we all know death welcomes us. She stands in our shadows, walking with us as we live our lives no matter how we may live them and await us to return to her arms.

Beyond death, there is only the intent and will of people. After all no matter how we are twisted and broken, the lacquer will always shine with our thoughts. Some intents are stronger, they knew, some ill and others kind. They wonder what their intent is, what the man with dusted skin's intent may be to bring them forth into this world of ice and shadow.

They were sweating in the wake of the illusion, they could identify it easily as one that turned your fears against you but still all's they could see were the face of one imposed over the dead while the other remained.

"Do you know the difference?" The trainer began, this one was strange with glowing eyes and tilted brows. They awaited the punishment for not knowing, silent and watching.

"There is a difference between us and those above. We are the foundation, the roots that hold the great tree up so that the leaves may grow. Those of ANBU pretend to be the darkness baring the weight of sins not meant for light but they are simply the underside of the leaf." She strung her next line of signs together as she stared at the two small girls. "Come now children, embrace your damnation," she continued her voice fading into a world where everything was just so slightly off from that in which they knew.  
They disliked her above all their other trainers.

They didn't see her again after that session, but they remembered the woman with glowing eyes. They could never quite shake the fear that they were not still in a genjutsu, that maybe they had been in one all along.

In the wake of the success of their first mission they had many others. One after another they piled up; theft, assassination, spying, recon and sabotage they walked mirroring one another hand in hand. It was after their fifth success they finally earned a name.

It was an honor many Kintsugi never received, history rarely remembers failures anyways.

"You've done well." He murmured to the two children kneeling before him. He felt heavy on their senses, like a fog they could not think through.

"Of course, Danzō-sama." They responded in the same breath, eyes wide and staring, motionless like dolls. If you move the spider knows you are there, be still, be still.

"You have proved yourself well enough to gain a name. From now on you will be agent Roku, do you understand?"

No, they did not.

"Thank you, Danzō-sama."

_"Listen, listen." She murmured flinging a kunai from her tiny hands._

_"What should I be listening to." The other asked, she was tired, fingers singed by failing jutsu._

_"Me of course."_

_"That is a given." For hours there was silence, they were content to listen to one another's unspoken words._

_"We are Roku."_

_"Ro or Ku?"_

_"Ku."_

_"Then I suppose I am Ro."_

And so, one named their other half Ro and took the name Ku. How simple, how quaint. No matter how much they were We, they knew they were now separate. They knew, they knew, and they adapted. They were never alone and yet their hearts no longer beat at the same rhythm.

First the bowl was taken and separated smoothly down the middle. Then it was changed again, with edges sharp, two halves of the same whole slowly being worn away so they no longer fit quite right.

But still they fit, they had to fit.

Ro was fluid. She was sharper, harder, colder. She watched for longer, moving ever so slowly unnoticed by her pray nothing but a branch swaying in the wind. Her hands curl into vital points so much faster, easier. Her mouth was full of silver words and poison. She was toxic.

Ku had a more solid stance, she could still remember what it was like to smile, her eyes still sparkled the same gleam as her teeth in the moonlight. It was there in the shadows underground that her flame flickers growing stronger. She was passion, she was an explosion. She was rigid and stubborn, but above all else she was never meant for this life.

Ro worshiped Ku, Ku cherished Ro, the gold lacquer held together what had been broken apart at birth so easily and sweetly that they always felt whole as long as one was near the other.

Their favorite trainer was Yon, he taught them how to pretend.

So that's what they did, they pretended.

They learned to emulate children, to be five and six and naïve. The learned to bow their head and cry on command, to make their face warm and smiles inviting. They learned to become poor and rich to be mist, rock, leaf, sand and so much more.

No matter what they did there was always an undercut of something wrong in the way they moved and held themselves. Unnerving, wrong. They wondered if it was because they were root or because they once were and always will be dying, dead, and decaying.

But they made for rather a beautiful ambush.

_"When will it stop?" Ku whispered to Ro._

_"When we are dead." The stars peaked through the leaves as the ghosted through the forest. They knew, they knew._

_"Aren't we already?"_

The thing about Kintsugi is if it isn't done just right the pieces will not hold and the only thing left is the broken remains of something horrible.


	2. Simplicity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yikes.  
> I feel like this chapter is a little flat but I needed Roku to move on to Kyoko. Next chapter, or maybe the next two depending on how it goes, will be about the Academy and how Kyoko actually sucks at the whole being a kid thing. Let me know what you think. If you catch any mistakes please let me know. Thank you for reading!

Great people are built on the backs of tragedy, the unlucky. It is in the great that we find those who have suffered the greatest. They knew this well enough, all the different epithets and sayings that accompanied it. They also knew that, in the end, the only difference between a tragedy and a comedy was the in the frame they are placed in.

Whether to laugh or cry, perception and intention, it was more a choice than anything else they had. It was theirs and theirs alone when not even their lives were theirs anymore.

It was of their nature, they found, to be so questioning and weary. It is no surprise then that when they were taught of the nature of the world, of the elements that laid trapped under their skin, that they deemed it lacking. There they found the bite of stone, the strength of a mountain slowly being worn away by the howling wind they would rather be. Dust to dust, to the earth they would return and in their blood the earth would rest. They were trapped, bound to the ground knee deep in mud.

It was disgusting, it was deplorable, it was poetic.

_A polish stone on a string was dangled over Ro's face, the wide excited eyes of Ku coming into her focus._

" _What is this?"_

" _A present, I made it from the limestone next to our bed." The stone gleamed for a moment before Ku grew impatient and threw it over her sisters head, the string catching awkwardly on her ears and in her hair. They never gave presents._

" _Why am I the frog?"_

" _I like the Scorpion best." They knew the real reason._

" _That's fine, I like the Frog best as well." She ran her fingers over the carved frog, the protective layer between her and the rock shockingly smooth._

" _And look, it's like us." Ku continued, pressing close to her sister and taking the stone from her hand to place the two halves together, "a part of the same whole."_

_They were quiet, watching the stone absently as they spoke without words again and again. An entire lifetime was lived in those space, in the silences they could speak in the span of seconds._

" _Thank you." It was all she could say, it was all there was to say. It was rather fitting really, for the Frog to carry the Scorpion, and the Scorpion to covet the Frog._

Time passed differently under the leaves, they knew this only from when they were above. They disliked how much faster everything was there, in the trees and through the fields the ever-present feeling of lives brushing their own.

It was annoying, it was paralyzing, it was everything they wish they could stand to be.

Sometimes Ku would tell Ro stories about how they could have been. Of farm girls, of travelers, of medics and shrine maidens, of anything but what they were. Ku liked to hold her sister's hands and rest her forehead against the other's, her black eyes gleaming strangely as she whispered these stories like prayers. She liked to dream of something more, something all their own.

Ro sometimes hated Ku for the fantasies she would bring to life with only her sister and the stars above as witnesses. It was nothing even remotely possible after all, these stories, these irretrievable dreams, this acrid burn on their tongues.

They knew, of course they knew.

Bitter, they continued.

Finally, it came to a point that they were to learn their own trade, something to make them stand out from the other agents cultivated like bacteria in the dark. In the privacy of their own minds they thought it was rather like biological warfare.

Poison and precision, Ro flourished in the dark an army all her own of blank smiles and senbon lined hems. The thing that went bump at night, the shadow in the moonlight, she was obscurity. Her specialty was in assassination, in wearing a new face at every turn, an unnoticed attrition against a populace barely watching. She always found it easy, becoming someone else that is. Ro wasn't real, Ro had so very little to let go so she could convince herself of the lie she told. That was the key, the trick. How could you lie to anyone if you couldn't lie to yourself?

She lied to Ku often.

" _Are you afraid?" Ku asked, the shredded remains of a fallen leaf drifted from her hands and into the auburn hair of her crouched sister._

" _Of what?" Ro responded unmoving as she adjusted the chakra she was feeding into her jutsu._

" _You know how all of this will end." A twig was knotted into Ro's hair next, angled awkwardly against her scalp._

" _Well we will erase this camp soon, there is nothing really to be afraid of."_

" _Don't be coy."_

" _It still remains, what is there to be afraid of Ku?" Ro finally dropped her hands and glanced up at the sky to check the time, they had to finish this before tonight._

" _I don't know."_

_All the best surprises happened in the daylight after all._

If Ro was finely powered batrachotoxin on the wind, made to kill, then Ku was ninja wire, 0.1 grade, thin as a strand of hair and stronger than a kunai.

Ku was best at laying out traps, at hiding trip wires angled with consequences under dead leaves and loose dirt. She was never very good with words, never one to dance around pretending to be something she wasn't. Where her sister was about misdirection and deception she found that she excelled in more direct methods of war. She learned to pool her earth elemental chakra into her legs and up her spine, to be unbreakable, unmovable. She could weather the worst of any attack and end it with a deafening crunch.

It wasn't enough, it was never enough.

She was too soft, hesitated too often. She knew who she was, who they could be, who they once were. She could see the lines they tread along, see girls who could be them but were not. She drowned in the misfortune of it all, in her dreams and the unlucky nature of their life. Children were never meant to be like this, they were never meant to see war, to feel the blood of their enemies slicking their hands and seeping into their skin.

But they did.

The only difference between Ro and Ku now was simply semantics. In the end it all boiled down the fact that Ro was the one who gave up and it was Ku who never had it in herself to do the same.

" _Tell me another story." She was inches from Ro's face this time, her unmarred mask staring, the beams of the morning sun lighting up the edges of her silhouette._

" _I don't understand why you insist on me telling you stories at all. There is nothing that I have that you do not already know." Ro sighed, rolling away from Ku to search for their map._

" _Tell me one anyways." Ku fell forward where her sister once was laying face first on the ground for a moment as she listened to the other breathe. No one spoke, they took to the trees and the silence filled the spaces they left as they continued North East the forest breaking apart to give way to the plains of Tea country._

" _In another time, at another place, there was a Dragon." Ro began pushing her way through the tall grass as silently as she could, "He was a rather young, still learning you see, but even in the wake of his naivety he was still wise and clever. When he was younger still, his mother used to tell him and his nestmates that when they were ready they would have to leave her shadow and find the place that called to their heart. The one who left first was neither the eldest nor the youngest, she was white scaled and wild like the wind. He heard she now rested at the highest mountain top, curled happily around the peak. In her wake, many of his kin followed one after another until he was the only one left._

' _Come now child, don't you think it is time? Are you not tired of this nest, of this cave?' His mother called to him, and he waited for days yet before turning and leaving his mother."_

" _She was kind to let him stay for so long."_

" _Perhaps she was. He searched and searched for a land that called to him, it took him years before he found where his heart may reside. It was a quaint place, a cave hidden away behind a waterfall with plenty of fish and places for him to explore. And he was happy there, but this would not be worth telling if that was all there was to this Dragon's story. You see the Dragon's home was not far off from a small human village, it was a rather poor village with little traffic and only their own crops to sustain them. One day while the Dragon rested just behind the waterfall there was a man who stumbled upon the Dragons land. He had been looking for food to feed his family and was overjoyed when he came across a place that could offer such a supply. He came back to the Dragon's lake day in and day out unaware of the eyes that watched him curiously from behind the waterfall._

_The Dragon knew of humans, knew of the things his Mother had passed down to him from hers and she from hers. They were volatile and short-lived creatures, rather greedy too. More likely to steal your very scales than to ask one of you._

_But still he wished to speak to this creature, and so he did._

' _Little human,' called the Dragon from behind his veil of water, 'why do you come and fish from my lake every day?'_

_Startled the human glanced around trying to locate the one who spoke to him. 'I am sorry, I had not realized that men could lay claim to lakes.'_

' _I know little of your customs, however' the Dragon began as he slides from behind the waterfall and glided in the water at its base his own pale scales blending with it. 'I scarcely think I am a man.' He finally continued as he rested on the rocks near the bank rising to his full height._

_Terrified the man ran-"_

" _Why?" Ku interrupted suddenly as she stopped forcing the other to come to a halt as well._

" _Come Ku, we have to reach our location before night fall. If the story is too distracting it can wait." Ro said gravitating closer to her sister, the wild flowers brushing her clothing._

" _It doesn't matter," she said, "why did the man run?"_

_They knew what she was really asking._

" _He was afraid."_

" _Of what?"_

" _His own mortality, I would think." It was more than that, so much more, they had seen it after all. Used it. Felt it. Been victim of it._

" _The Dragon never threatened him."_

" _And yet he runs back to his village, rallies all the able men and kills the Dragon. What is your point?"_

" _It's unfair."_

" _People are rarely fair. Shinobi even less so." It was their reality._

_They stood in silence for a moment simply watching each other, their blank masks streaked with mud from the rains of yesterday._

_Ro turned on her heel and left her sister standing at the center of a field. She found her there again three days later on her way home sprawled on her back. They knew, oh, they knew what it meant._

_Maybe that was the beginning of the end, maybe there was never a beginning to end anyway._

Roku was a unit, a single agent, they could feel the beak of an old war hawk closing in on them. It was in the dark under the Great Tree that everything fell apart. It was there that a part of a whole stood alone and We became I.

It was the worst, it was the best. A comedy and a tragedy, it was freeing and damning all at once.

The lacquer gave way and one half of the bowl was discarded. The other half was taken and shattered, the sharp edge wet with blood as it was changed once again into something else.

She felt so very hollow.

Again, Roku found herself kneeling before the man with skin like dust and tea stained paper, she couldn't ignore the metallic smell clinging to her hair, to her skin, to her soul. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was grief, sorrow, joy.

She didn't know, she didn't know.

He told her to smile, so she did.

He told her of a mission, of a man she needed to watch, and so she would. It was all she could do, it was all she knew after all, to do as she was told.

"Do you understand?" His voice was quiet, it was so quiet without the steady breathing of the other. It was an existence held separate from all others, full of whispers and shadows muffled by the earth above, as if afraid maybe the sun might hear if they were not careful.

It was rather like eating chalk.

"Of course, Danzō-sama."

"Your name from this moment forward is Kyoko."

How very ironic.

It hurt.

_Batrachotoxin and homobatrachotoxin; extracted from the oils produced by the skin of a frogs procured in the forests outside of Ame. It was difficult to catch, difficult to make._

_Ricin; from the oils of a red leaved plant found in a wasteland near Suna. They were rare, often forgotten by those not in the sand._

_Strychnine; pulled from the leaves of a climbing shrub in their own backyard, two miles from Konoha's west walls._

" _What happens if you poison yourself Ro?"_

" _I die."_

_True Immunity, like immortality, is a lie after all._

It was a work of art how they spun her a life. She was now an orphan child who has lived in Konoha for the past 6 years, her parents were Career Chūnin who died out on the field. Her files were carefully doctored and aged, placed in all the correct places with all the right people. Kyoko was to live in the Orphanage until she began the Academy, she was not to report to Him until she had been living her life long enough to avoid suspicion.

It wasn't her first time pretending, she was a running root that stretches far and wide prickled with thorns. She was far more useful to the shadows, no matter what that meant, and found the colors of the village jarring. She felt so very wrong, the skin on her face too tight. Sunlight felt strange on her skin, her smile was frozen, the orphanage's matriarch stared.

It was all so very strange.

She supposed she was the strange one here.

For days she watched and listened, she forced herself to remember her lessons, what it meant to walk and talk like a child with eyes wide and searching. She tried to ignore the blood she knew was not there on her skin and held the hands of strangers. She built Kyoko, painting her there on the blank canvas that was her very self. She made herself into a shy girl with wide eyes, an average innocent, someone people never looked twice at. She favored bitter foods over sweets, liked frozen treats, flowers, and paper dolls.

_She could never quite pull it off, that to others Kyoko was a strange girl who felt so very off. To stiff, to quiet, to still. Those in the market thought that perhaps she was a little touched, they passed her small tokens to appease their own guilt at the sight of a child with such misfortune. Those who could remember the time of the warring clans whispered to one another of children barely able to totter their way onto the battle field with sharp blank eyes and teeth red with blood._

_Her words were too rehearsed, her eyes too flat. Above all else everyone could see how she paused as if waiting for someone else, how she moved as if there was another by her side a space now empty and vast._

She had been used to danger, used to living among the dead day in and day out, used to an ever-present warmth at her back.

She was so very cold.

The noise was rather deafening at first, sleeping with so many other girls so close she swore sometimes she could hear their heartbeats. What was the strangest was seeing the vast complexity in each of the other children, how they wore their emotions so proudly like it was something natural. Like it was something they didn't have to think about.

And maybe they didn't.

Out of all the children she now lived with her favorite to watch were little Daichi and Hiroyuki, two boys born only weeks apart placed in the Orphanage on the same day. They were thought by the matriarch to be the best behaved of the children in the Orphanage, but their peers knew of their true nature. The two nine-year-olds had been going to the academy for the past two years, something they like to lord over the younger children, something they rather liked to demonstrate when bullying them as well.

Kyoko was also one of their favorites, she was different and they liked to crush oddities. They noticed on some level how she couldn't quite keep up with the steps everyone else already seemed to know, how her eyes cast out and watched before she reacted. It was funny, it was sad. Untimely she found them rather sub par in everything but their ability to intimidate others with so little actual skill. She meant little to them, they meant even less to her.

She knew every little crack in their visage, every unfilled blemish and how she could grind them to dust with but a few words. But Kyoko didn't much care for such conflict.

She remembered someone saying once that children were cruel, she found age had very little to do with it.

She entered the Academy for the first official time as she turned seven, that is where she was to meet a boy with twice damned eyes and a girl destined to die.


	3. Melancholy

Humans find comfort in routine, there is something intrinsically calming about having at least one constant to cling to. It was one of the first things that Roku learned when she was first being trained by Yon.

Farmers tend to walk with steady paces, civilian children her age still run with a little bit of a stumble, and everyone had a routine.

Every person worth being called a person has at least one thing they do daily as a way to ground themselves. It natural for civilians and a part of coping for the general shinobi populous, a way to humanize yourself for the others around you.

Root did not have a routine.

As an agent, you couldn't even be sure you would wake up in the morning let alone anything else, this made a routine fundamentally irrelevant. They were not people. Roku would never be a person, not like Kyoko would. It took a while for her to understand and accept that facet of her life. With this it was easy to conclude that Roku and Kyoko were not mutually exclusive, Roku was a part of Kyoko but Kyoko was not a part of Roku.

_She was neither Ro nor Ku, she wasn't Roku, she wasn't even Kyoko, she knew this and yet it was so much easier to lie to herself at night. She was here, she was here, she had to be here._

_It had to mean something._

Kyoko leads with her left foot, right hand, she kept her fingers and nails fanatically clean and proper, these were the things that Roku shared with her. Kyoko was also a shy girl, she blushed under the weight of the stares of others and cowered in the face of the loud and brash, she was kind and thoughtful and above all else, she had a routine. Roku was and did not.

The separation was imperative for those who could so easily become what they pretended to be.

_Who was she? She didn't know, she didn't know, maybe she was the ash in the air maybe she was a rotting corpse, a death rattle from dry lips._

Roku's lack of identity had to be kept so she could perform properly as an agent, and as an agent she had to accurately play the part of Kyoko. She understood all of this, it was conceptually simple, and she found that the entire processes grossly overestimated the flexibility of a human psyche.

But Root were never human anyway. They were puppets and dolls and weapons with cracked images embedded on their skin. They were anything but human, they were nothing.

It was the tea house that she made the key to her routine, the center of the life of Kyoko. It wasn't particularly out of the ordinary for a shy girl to make her way to the traditional tea house on her way from the academy. It would never be considered something to make particular note of, nothing that would be deemed important.

North of the orphanage, the others do not follow, leave the report in the seal under the table. Bow your head, don't meet their eyes, she knows they know.

It was only in the little tea house on the market corner that she is content, it is quiet there, everyone moving at their own pace, their lives held separate from your own. There she is in a place all her own where she might be able to shoulder her own deeds. Her sins clinging to her, in her hair and on her hands and she searches for them in the mirror. The shadows are omnipresent and she knows, oh, she knows she will always be found lacking.

She particularly liked to watch the others there. She never really understood it all, the flare they had, the smooth transitions and sweeping motions. But still everyday she stood, eyes down, eyes always down, in the threshold.

The owner was an older man, his skin paper thin like his hair and his voice, but he always welcomed her.

She didn't understand how he could pretend he couldn't see right through her.

There were so many things she didn't understand in that place. She particularly didn't understand that when there was a shattered cup, the edges jagged, her eyes never left it, its pieces scattered over the wooden floor. It didn't happen often; the shattering of cups and bowls were rare in such an establishment and should it ever happen it was always the fault of a clumsy customer. Still the girls in elaborate kimono and willowy limbs shouldered the blame, heads bowed.

She didn't understand why she asked, just this once she watched the cup shatter and asked if perhaps she could have it. She had no money, had no means.

"If you could, just this once, let me have the pieces?" Her eyes never left the ground, her hands were shaking, this wasn't a part of the plan. She didn't know what it meant, why she felt she so adamantly needed the shattered cup.

They were kind, so very kind, the paper man dipping forward with a smile. And so, Kyoko left, in a takeout box there were shattered pieces, in her hands they were precious.

_The room was dark, it was so dark and cold and they could feel it in their chests and across their skin. There was movement everywhere, the underground was awake, the others crawling along the walls and ceilings watching and waiting for one wrong move, waiting for them to fail._

_The seal on their tongues burned._

" _Perhaps we should have tried harder?" Her voice was pitched questioningly, a desperate sort of panic wedging itself between the wavering octaves._

_They knew this would come, they could taste it in the air like ozone before a storm. It was time, it was time._

" _You and I both know it would not have mattered."_

It took her time to gather what she needed, a stray cup of flour, a painter's pallet knife. She didn't understand why she did it, none of it mattered. Sandpaper and lacquer from the shop down the street hidden in a waistband. She couldn't stop herself, all her training, all her conditioning was slipping through her fingers, and all she could do was watch. Golden powder held in a small jar.

It took her weeks and yet here she sat, legs tucked under her the pieces of a broken cup laid methodically out. She stared and stared and the sun rose then set again, yet she remained.

_It wasn't really a surprise, it was something every root operative knew. Each agent was a team, the team was cultivated and grown together and then the operative was pruned of the excess growth._

_The plaster was crumbling, it hurt, it hurt._

_And perhaps it was a bit wasteful, perhaps it didn't matter as long as it got results. In the end, if one didn't bow both would fall._

Her fingers were long, the ends of her hair jagged and skin ashen. It was obvious she should have been tanned, the base for it was there, but instead she was sickly and sunken with dark bruises and flat eyes. Sometimes when she was still and the world caught up to her, she could feel her bones creak with weariness.

She was cold, she was thin, she was so very tired.

_Water and flour, mixed evenly, neither sandy nor watery._

She could remember when they had been younger, when the other would still wonder why they were the ones taken. They would look at one another, sat knee to knee, eye to eye, tracing the features they saw there, wondering and searching and yearning. They searched for the features they saw, in the reflection they could see inside wide eyes. Was it happenstance? Were they given away? Taken, stolen, buried, hated, forgotten. Did it really matter?

_Add in the lacquer carefully as to not let it touch the skin._

She had decided long ago that they were simply unlucky, it didn't matter. It wouldn't matter. They were already buried, dead in coffins three feet tall under a pile of spider lilies and snapdragons. The how was over and they were living in it, she was living in it. There was little time left for such speculation, the energy had a better use.

_Line the edges of the broken pieces and press them gently, firmly, together. Scrape away the excess and be careful, take time to ensure the lacquer will hold and then let it sit somewhere safe to dry._

And she knew she was poorly made, she knew this in how she felt like she was choking, when her breath came a bit harder and faster every time she saw her own reflection, every time she thought she saw what she knew was no longer. She knew all of that man's art was just a little bit wrong, that they never quite turned out right. She didn't blame him, the medium he chose was always unpredictable in how it would respond to the lacquer, to the break, to the process.

_After a week or two or three, clean up the edges. Wet the sandpaper and carefully smooth away the lacquer in layers._

She didn't notice much in the academy, she didn't bother to interact with her peers beyond what was necessary, but still, she saw. Peripherally she noticed a girl whose very presence set her teeth on edge and a boy who trailed that girl. She wondered, absently, mindlessly, if perhaps this girl and boy were anything more than her mind conjuring something to punish her with. Like the other boy with hair like precious metals and steel eyes, like how her hands shook and she saw familiar faces everywhere she turned.

_Take new lacquer and mix gold, or copper, or silver, into it. Carefully, so very carefully, add it to that which already held the pieces together. Let it rest, let it dry._

She remained average, she was neither best nor the worst in taijutsu, didn't particularly excel in ninjutsu or genjutsu, did not find her niche in the theories and thoughts she was taught to write and repeat. She especially, specifically, did not notice the recruiting. Kyoko was too innocent, too trusting, to notice the ANBU with their puzzles and tests skulking around corners and in shadows on ceilings. She was simply average, unassuming, practiced.

_Carefully cover the entire piece in a clear coat, something that will hold and protect the pottery keeping the lacquer from leaching and flaking, from being toxic._

It was funny really, how in her unfailingly average act she became undeniably unique. She didn't notice how the Academy teachers watched her with narrowed eyes, how her disregard for their approval unnerved. They notice how she floated exactly at the center of the crowd, hiding behind other children's enthusiastic babble, she was a ghost untouched and unfazed by the world at large.

Two years in the academy came and went, three as Kyoko, and she found herself kneeling again her head bowed, her eyes so very blank, blank, blank. She reported to him, recounting the important, recounting Kyoko.

"You've done well, your written reports have shown how integrated you have made yourself." He said, it was nice, horrifying, relieving, nauseating to be back here. She felt safe, she felt hunted, she felt cursed and cold and horrible all at once. Had she really done well? She couldn't tell, she simply did it and lived and lied.

"Thank you, Danzō-sama."

She was to do everything she could to endure, to ensure. So, she slipped into the records and doctored her files, she carefully aligned it so her sensei would be her target, she could not fail she would not fail. And it should have worked, would have worked.

But it didn't.

_That was how one made Kintsugi art out of the broken and useless._

The day before they announced teams, she knew she had failed. Her team was made up of two civilian born boys, meant for the Genin corps, meant for fodder and maggot feed. She was ten and short and punished, of course she was punished, she could still taste the metal of her own blood and the bitter ache of screams swallowed.

But she was still salvageable.

Kyoko finally allowed herself to take notice of a sweet girl with brown hair and purple markings. As they were released to speak with their teammates she ghosted her way past the crowds acting as the other girl's shadow, their steps echoing as one, the sway of their bodies in tune.

_There were far more creative ways to make Kintsugi art deadly than to simply be careless. That was how she and her sister were made after all, by an expert in the art of turning Kintsugi into a weapon. For instance, there are some lacquers that are made from the sap of the poison oak, with the right treatment it would do rather nice to weaken an immune system._

"Rin!" Kyoko called, her feet tapping loudly on the ground as she rushed after the other girl.

"Hello?" The girl turned, her smile polite but confused, it would be the first time they had ever talked in the time they had been in the academy after all. Kyoko forced a blush to rush across her face as she jerked into a messy bow her body nearly parallel with the ground.

"I know this seems strange but I have always admired you and have been trying to find a way to say this," she said in a rush pausing to glance up from in between the strands of hair she had flung into her face with the force of her bow, "congratulations on graduating and being top girl, will you please have a cup of tea with me?"

_A weak immune system makes even the weakest of poisons deadly._

Rin wasn't the type to refuse such honesty, Kyoko knew that much. She could read it in how she moved, how she spoke, how she held herself. The underlining flattery certainly didn't hurt.

"Oh!" Rin said before her demure smile shifted again, keeping track was so tiring. "Of course I will have tea with you, which tea house do you prefer?"

Kyoko laughed awkwardly squinting her eyes as she dragged an awkward smile onto her lips, "I kind of spent my allowance, would you mind coming to the orphanage with me? I have some really nice tea, I promise!" She darted forward to take hold of one of Rin's hands with both of her own, her hands were dry, "I really want to get to know you a little, please accept my invitation!"

Rin jumped in surprise from the intensity of Kyoko's request, the hand the other girl was not holding coming up to press against her own cheek. "That sounds fine, don't worry about it!"

Beaming Kyoko immediately began to lead Rin by the hand to the orphanage, chattering about everything she could think about excitedly.

"I'm really sorry," Rin interrupted Kyoko sheepishly as they entered the orphanage, "I have been trying to remember your name for a while now and just can't at all!"

"I'm Kyoko!" She laughed in response, unaware her overjoyed smile bared one too many teeth to be considered polite. "Here is the kitchen, give me a moment to run to my room and get my tea!"

She had two Kintsugi cups she has made, one a gold of fallen oak leaves, the other coppery like blood. Maojian Tea was a sweet tea, it would pair well with the equally sweet arsenic.

_And a weak immune system makes a stronger poison so much deadlier._

"Oh! Those are beautiful, where ever did you get them?" Rin gasped as she reached forward to take hold of the cups, her eyes wide and searching.

"I made them, it isn't particularly hard. Maybe I will teach you some time?" Kyoko laughed again as she set the teapot to heat up, her fingers slipping into her sleeves to trace the packet of poison. It wouldn't do to ruin all of her tea leaves after all.

"Would you? It's so rare to see someone practice Kintsugi outside of the capital, I have always wanted to learn." Rin squealed happily her dark eyes shinning excitedly. Kyoko watched a strand of hair drift slowly onto the counter.

"Of course! You have been to the capital then?" Kyoko asked sliding carefully by Rin to pick up both of the cups to rinse them in the orphanage sink.

"Once or twice with my family, my father is a merchant and my mother a medic at the hospital." The tea pot screeched, calling for their attention. Kyoko carefully poured tea into both cups and stared for a moment as the tea traced the repaired cracks.

"They must be really proud of you!" She started abruptly as she picked up the cups, powder slipped into the cup with golden lacquer dissolving quickly, it wouldn't do to give a dying girl anything but the best after all. "Do you plan to follow in your mom's footsteps and become a medic?" Kyoko continued as she passed the Golden cup over to Rin, pausing a moment before she took a sip of her own tea.

"I'm not really sure, I don't even know what Minato- sensei is like! We are supposed to meet in an hour so maybe I will mention it to him." Rin sighed rolling her eyes slightly with a huff.

"I can understand that," five minutes was how long it took for arsenic to take effect, "are you nervous at all? About your team, I mean."

"I wasn't really, I think it's just hitting me now!" Rin laughed awkwardly as she pushed some of her hair out of her face.

It looked like it might storm.

"Oh, I am sure everything will go fine!" Diluted like it was the arsenic wasn't truly deadly, especially with the dose Kyoko had used. It was undetectable like that, no one would notice, no one would care.

"I don't know, being in the academy is different than being out in the real world." She was clearly uncomfortable now, a fly unware of the web it was caught in.

"Well, I might have something to help you? It's an herbal remedy I take every now and then when I am nervous, it certainly helped me." Arsenic in small doses causes the one poisoned to panic, to feel the walls slowly close in on them as their stomach crawled its way up their throat pressing back on their lungs choking them from the inside.

"Oh, please, if you think it will work I am willing to try it! I don't think I will be able to last at all if I go meet my team like this!"

It was a trick used sometimes by poison masters, to slowly layer poison after poison to make a deadly concoction that mimics the effects of common illnesses. It makes the normally undetectable poisons even more unnoticeable.

"Don't worry about it! Here let me put it in your tea so you can go ahead and take it, it should help in around ten minutes." Kyoko smiled sweetly as she dumped the new poison into Rin's tea. "It tastes absolutely horrible though."

Aconite for her anxiety, may she great Mother without fear

Rin tilted her head back to drain the cup as quickly as possible, her nose wrinkling cutely as she made a face at Kyoko.

_Porcelain shattered as it fell to the ground a body staggering before it steadied against another. Her hands came up to rest on either side of the others mask, eyes already glassy and distant._

" _Will you," Her voice cracked the words fading on her tongue, "Will you do one thing for us?"_

" _Anything." The other replied in a whisper, it was raining where no one else could see._

Kyoko watched Rin leave, the skin on her face felt just a bit too tight. It was a shame, she had such pretty lacquer. She couldn't help but notice that it was raining again.

" _Agent Roku, complete protocol." Her trainer was there, the first one with flat bright eyes and a face as blank as her own. She did as she was told, she always did as she was told, the fire was bright but she was cold._

_The room smelled foul, heat and sulfur and burning bones._

Kyoko stared blankly ahead shoulder to shoulder with the other children of her graduating class, each of them dressed in black with eyes cast down. They were not yet needed on the field, not yet ready, who would mind if a few children mourned one last time.

She died in her sleep, they said the lines around their eyes and mouth deep with the weight of a death. But Kyoko knew, she always knew.

It was war, it was war, it wasn't personal.

Kyoko will know that in her last moments Rin saw hell, her body a prison that snuffed out its own flame.

She did not mourn.

The man was Golden, he stared and stared and stared and she watched.

_The ash collected on her skin, on her mask, on her clothing, and in her hair. She was a girl with dusted skin now, like the man who stood over two who now stood over one._

_Ash to ash, dust to dust._

"Well team, this is the new addition I was talking about." It didn't look like he had slept for quite some time, his voice was hoarse and the skin under his eyes bruised.

He was blonde, his eyes were blue, his smile hurt but she couldn't afford to look away. She had nothing to hide, she had done nothing wrong. It was a lie she had to believe because it was rather obvious he knew, perhaps he even knew she knew he knew.

She was so very tired.

"This is Kyoko, Kyoko this is Obito," he paused long enough to wave vaguely towards the boy who hid behind goggles and strained smiles, his own grumbling around the edges, "and that is Kakashi." He dropped his hand and the boy made of metal and silver and everything similar in color but softer than the steel he pretended to be staunchly ignored her.

The training field was full of silence and dandelions, their white seeds twisting around them as they stood watching each other.

In the silence she remained, in the silenced she had always lived.

Their training began with teamwork, the silver boy who lied as much as Kyoko herself snapped his teeth like a rabid dog and the other spit and hissed like a feral cat. The man looked at her expectantly and she simply stared back eyes so very blank behind drooping eyelids.

She thinks that perhaps he was disappointed but maybe she saw resignation there instead. She didn't think she would ever get used to the micro-emotions everyone here seemed to have. How they could hold so much she would never understand.

People were too much like clouds, they could only hold so much before it began to storm.


	4. Calamity

Life is full of patterns.

She was born as two, they watched and watched and learned, they survived and then they died. Two became one, mend the crack with metal. She was born as one, she watched and watched and learned, she survived again and then somewhere down the line something died. Mend the crack with copper, stronger than gold, stronger than silver, and red like blood spilled.

She was born as three.

She was born as three, or perhaps something like it, and so she does as she always has done and watches and watches and learns once again. It wasn't different, wasn't a change from what she had always done. She ate with the boy without the eyes of his clan, who wore goggles to keep them protected in a desperate hope that maybe one-day, someday, sometime, life would pity him. She trailed after him heel to toe, toe to heel, listening to him speak of dreams and what she thinks life would be, should be. But, oh, since he was she and she was him she knew he was bitter under his naivety, bitter-sweet. She knew how it tasted so strangely like poison on her tongue, how it corroded away the edges of her teeth and burn a hole in her stomach so the acid and bile may mix; putrid.

She trained with the other, the boy-not-boy who claimed himself akin to ice, to something beyond. He was fast and smart, with wit and would-be-wolves snapping with too sharp teeth. She sat in silence beside him during storms, a canopy stretched above to shield them from the summer rains as she listened to his breathing between the tapping of droplets. Again, she was him like she was the other and so she knew how he hid behind his rules and regulations, clinging to what could only be right. If it wasn't right then what was the point? Sometimes she remembered phantom laughter, of eyes squinted happily, of a stitch in her side as she doubled over and the pleasant burn, but it left as quickly as it came.

They were three, not the same yet they were all part of the same whole, me, myself and I.

_She stops thinking of the irony._

The last of their group, their sensei, was a man of infallibility. She was not him but knew as her gaze trailed after him that he could easily stand next to the man with dusted skin and watching eyes. He tapped her feet and arms, correcting stances and stopping failed Jutsu with a smile so bright it was like the sun that danced in the blue of his eyes. He hurt her every time he turned that smile on her, she knew he knew and he knew she knew. A memory of a blood-stained smile twisted up toward dark eyes glittering in pain, and another of eyes widened in amazement and shy smiles. Of trust and of the time two became one.

She felt that he was rather cruel.

" _Do you have a dream?" She was there again, making Kintsugi in the dark under the Hashirama trees._

" _What do you mean Sensei?" He rested beside her watching as they both remained seated in traditional Seiza. It was silent for some time, the quiet scrap of sandpaper and the chirps of crickets in the distance their symphony._

" _What is your dream Kyoko?" He asked again without an explanation, up at the stars. Kyoko never had a dream, Roku never had a dream, she didn't know she needed one. He knew anyway, she didn't understand why he was even bothering to ask._

" _Please," she dismissed him, "there is no real room for dreams here are there?"_

" _I have a dream, I actually have a few of them!" He laughed, "I don't think any of them are really unreasonable. I want to see my village prosper, I want to make a life with my cute girlfriend and," he paused again turning to look down at her, "I want to see my students live a long, happy, life."_

_A frog croaked loudly somewhere nearby._

" _What does it mean to be happy?" She didn't mean to ask that, she didn't mean to say that. She watched his eyes narrow before she was released from his gaze as he cast them back up to the sky._

" _It's different for everyone, and kind of hard to describe."_

_The silence between them was tense and heavy._

" _I guess it's kind of bubbly," He continued after a moment, "that isn't really right either. You feel lighter when you are happy, truly happy."_

" _Are you happy Sensei?"_

" _I don't know but I would like to think I am."_

They were a heavy assault team in the making, an Uchiha, the son of the White Fang, and a civilian not so civilian born. They learned formation after formation, a through z, one through twenty, always cover each other's backs you only have each other. It was a time of war and they were a genin team being trained to fight and kill and die.

Ninja lived short lives and fought even shorter battles, nothing but a burst of concentrated motion, keep the other side on the defense in any way you can. Severed heads and corpse piles, psychological ware-fare with wide eyed children and blank faces. With the whispers of death in the wind and a sickeningly sweet smile, cut off food and supplies, poison the rivers, salt the crops, flank from around the north while you attack in the west. Fight dirty, cover yourself in the blood of the enemy and walk into the fires of hell with your head high. They do not care how you win as long as you win.

It was their first time out of the village as a team. They edged around the perimeter of the battle field, forcing themselves to keep pace with their sensei, they were just to deliver supplies, they were noncombatants this time. They were careful, Minato was careful, but sometimes you just cannot prevent the inevitable.

It was war and they were fighting in it.

She had to admit it was rather impressive, she didn't even sense the enemy approach and she was the best out of the roots to taste blood in the air. On that mission all three little soldiers killed, one cried, one smiled and another turned away. It started with a kunai, it ended with a kunai.

As was their life.

There was nothing particularly interesting about the mission, the complications aside they completed it without a hitch and returned to the village within their allotted time, clothing dotted with blood, first blood for one. It was, however, apparent that their sensei didn't hold the same sentiment, He certainly was not pleased with a prominent frown pulling at his face as you regarded them.

They had done everything they possibly could have done. Minato watched, Obito and Kakashi argued and bickered. One screamed himself hoarse the other walked away. They had been gathered standing in the clearing they used for training, a minor debriefing the chill of winter clouding the air around them. Konaha's trees were another thing she didn't understand. They never turned color, evergreens, but they held none of the trademark evergreen leaves.

And now they were alone.

Obito was breaking his hands on a training-post and the leaves refused to change with the seasons. She should say something.

"There is a turtle drowning in a well somewhere." Kyoko began, watching his body heave with each strike he made. "This metaphoric turtle is yelling in its little turtle voice 'Please someone, anyone, save me! I don't want to die." She pitched her voice higher, ignoring the break it caused as she held up a finger, "There is no one there to help the turtle."

He paused a moment in confusion, stopping long enough to glance over his shoulder. "Why not?"

"Because he needs to save himself." She tugged on a leaf, yanking it from a branch and twisting it between her fingers by the stem absently.

"If someone is calling out for help, why wouldn't someone help them?"

"What does a human care for the single life of a Turtle."

"It's cruel!" He snapped his red eyes, not red enough, gleaming with unshed tears behind tinted goggles, "Besides what is the point of all of this? It's stupid."

"Ah," She blinked absently at him, unimpressed as she closed one eye and used her perspective to cover his face with the leaf, "What is the point of crying over the turtle? It got itself in the situation it was in and saving it would only endanger you."

She knew what it meant and so should he.

"You're just like Kakashi! People aren't like this, people don't just stand by and let things die." He shouted, turning to walk away from her.

She turned her hand and crushed the leaf.

"Don't they?" She asked as she lifted her gaze to count the clouds there, feeling the chill creep in around her without his chakra near, "Who ever said we were even human anyway."

The Turtle will die, it is inevitable. He will drown in the well exhausted beyond belief and no one will know.

No one will know but Obito, the never changing and ever so bitter Hashirama leaf.

" _I wish I didn't understand you." The whisper was hot on her cheek like her breath was hot on the others. They knew what she really meant, they knew what was unsaid like they knew everything about each other. It wasn't hard, it wasn't strange, it was damning and brilliant and home._

" _Wishing gets us nothing." She sighed rolling to lay on her back and away from the stare she could feel even in the dark. "We are stuck here, that is that and now we just live."_

" _Is that living?"_

" _We live a life, one of suffering yes but that does not make it any less ours."_

" _I don't want it."_

" _And yet here we are."_

" _I want someone to remember our name." she paused a moment reaching out to her sister to trace the face partially turned away from her, "what is our name?"_

" _Roku?"_

" _No, no, that sounds wrong, doesn't it?"_

" _It is what it is."_

" _It doesn't make it any less wrong."_

" _We are Roku now, you are Ku and I am Ro. That is all that matters, all that we have."_

" _People don't live like this, humans can't live like this."_

" _Who ever said we were human?"_

It kept happening, over and over again they sharpened their blades on the bones of those who stood before them, blood pooling at their feet equally that of their enemies and that of their own. Obito cried and cried, kicked and screamed and she watched as he died a little every day with each voice he silences. Kakashi stood unflinching, unmoving, almost perfect and yet nowhere near perfection for she saw each misstep he made. And Kyoko? She lived and lived and all at once never truly did. After all, she had only ever known silence, so in it she stayed.

Someone was screaming in her silence, it was deafening.

She could feel herself unraveling.

_And so, she stood toe to toe with a clone, her eyes wide and unblinking, their eyes wide and unblinking._

_"Have you gotten everything you needed, Kyoko?"_

_"Of course, you are a very good teacher."_

_"You and I both know what I mean."_

_A kunai and a cloud of smoke, she could feel her self-flaking, breaking._

_Batrachotoxin, Ricin, and Strychnine._

_The ink on her tongue burned._

It was always cold under Konoha's trees, after all under the earth the sun could never touch them, the chill seeped through the dirt and into the skin of those who dwelled here. She never got used to the cold. It was manageable, before everything fell apart, and now she often felt like she was frozen still in the face of it all. An ice sculpture made by a careless artist, one day she too would melt away.

"Have you gained his trust?" and that was all artists were, careless and mindless with no regard to who they hurt, sacrificing everything for their art.

"I am unsure." All of the military heads here were artists in their own right, "he has confided to me on occasion, however, I believe he is aware of my hand in the death of the girl."

The Hokage was a builder, walls and soldiers and civilians spiraling outward with the sort of hopeless abandoned you find in the half-starved and mad. He turned to his own artists as a means to protect what he built. The director of T&I sculpted minds making art with shattered edges, the Jonin commander took his men and set them up like shogi pieces full of molded bodies and domino pieces, and ANBU turned out painted faces, smiling masks full of bravado in the shadows. She had been watching and watching and watching for so long she failed to see the difference between those above her and the Kintsugi man before her, failed to see the point when they were all the same.

"He may very well suspect you of something," He paused flipping absently through the folder in his hands "however, it is apparent that you have done well in hiding any evidence that may lead him to me." The folder snapped closed, the white of his bandages stark against his skin, a single blank eye staring, "I expect to see a drastic improvement in the amount of information I receive."

"Of course, Danzō-sama."

The trainers within Root were really no different either, each one was a tool used to create a manufactured masterpiece from an assembly line made by machines. Water and flour evenly mixed, flat eyes and masks for faces.

"Finish Agent Shi's infiltration training."

It was the first time she was used as a trainer, it wasn't a surprise, it was bound to happen eventually. They were small, and they were alone. They stared, they dare not breathe, her eyes wide as the two children stood before her shoulder to shoulder, hands intertwined, their broken bodies held together with bandages and haphazard stitching.

And so, she taught them how to pretend. In the same voice she remembered, with the same words said to her, she taught and taught and the longer she spoke the less it hurt.

" _Roku," The shorter Shi called out to her, "where is the other?"_

" _Specify." She carefully folded their kimono, meant for when they had to infiltrate the upper-class._

" _The other Roku." He sighed as if she should have already known._

_She felt her lacquer shift, weakening._

" _There was never another Roku."_

" _Oh."_

_There had only ever been Ro and Ku anyways._

The winds from beyond the northeast border dragged blunted nails along their skin as they leaped through the thinning trees. They were to offer relief for a watch team, it was an easy mission, everything always went wrong on the easy missions. And predictably it seemed that the battle field had moved without Konoha being informed and instead of a semi-calm forest they were traipsing through a war zone.

Minato lifted a fist for us to halt and quickly signed for us to return to the edge of the battle field. We turned, a group of our shinobi intertwining Justus to release a water dragon strong enough to raze a mountain when a shadow passed over us.

Kyoko wasn't sure what happened in between the shadow and her face grinding into the grass, she could see the feet of the shinobi from before, it was like slow motion as she watched a boulder crush them with a deep bass-like boom that rattled her teeth, left her disoriented and deaf.

The new mountain gave birth to a river of blood, someone was screaming, she couldn't stop staring.

It wasn't the worst death she had ever seen, wasn't the best either, but still, she stared and stared and when another shadow passed over them, eclipsing the sun for a moment, she continued to stare. She stayed like that, unmoving until the breath was knocked out of her lungs and all she could see was the green of a Jonin vest. She remained still, unblinking, barely breathing, like a corpse. Minato placed her down, his mouth was moving, she tried to say something and gave up rather quickly when nothing came.

He tried to sign something to her, she still didn't understand.

It was all rather like snapshots really, her sensei's yellow hair, the tree branches below them, a line of ants, a bird, and then everything snapped back to her. She screamed and screamed and screamed, listening to her own voice and the surprised shouts of others near her. She could hear her teacher say something and then everything was dark.

" _What do you think the best way to die is?" Ku asked her fingers intertwining with her sister's as the other continued her surveillance._

" _Probably in our sleep," Ro responded absentmindedly, "decapitation or old age."_

" _That's boring, isn't it?" Ku sighed, throwing her head back to shift her balance and sit precariously on the tree branch._

" _It is practical."_

" _I think it would be fun to go out with style." She tilted her head as she studied her sister, "Like a paper bomb or something."_

" _You want us to be pink mist?"_

" _I don't want to be anything, I just think it would be more interesting."_

" _Death isn't supposed to be interesting."_

" _Says who?"_

She had been in shock, the chakra backlash of the boulder hitting the ground and the fact her face was against said ground was enough to give her the equivalent of a chakra concussion. They were now in a clearing while Minato attempted to identify where how far the new war zone covered. They had all just managed to change their clothing, the old sets soaked through with blood making them far too easy to track.

"Rule #25: A shinobi must never show their tears." Kakashi snapped at a sniffling Obito as the boy attempted to wrap the edges of his pants down.

"Shut up! Just do us all a favor and shut up about your stupid shinobi rules Kakashi!" Obito yelled, throwing the roll of bandages he had in his hand to the ground, "Even Kyoko was affected! We just watched twenty of our comrades die to a single attack, I have every right to be upset!"

He was searing, his chakra boiling under his skin scorching her still raw senses. 

"This," Kakashi waved his hand in-between them, "This is why you will never be Hokage," he continued with a growl as his own chakra rose instinctually to meet Obito's, the static buzz right before a lightning strike, "You are so emotionally caught up in your own stupid ideas and expectations you can't complete a mission. We are Shinobi, we kill the enemy, we do not to feel sad and cry about someone who was too slow to dodge."

A crack rang out as Kakashi's face whipped to the side, Obito's knuckles were bleeding.

_Mend it with gold, a good conductor._

She wished she could say something, that she could make them see reason, whatever that was. Everything was still for a moment, shock and awe, then there was an explosion of movement, the blade of Kakashi's sword flashing as he made a wild swipe at Obito only to be blocked by their teacher.

"I think," He sounded tired and old, so very wary, "that is enough from both of you. We are on a mission, argue when we are home." They stared and stared and then Kakashi vanished in a puff of smoke. Minato followed like he always does.

They were alone like they always tended to be.

"Kyoko," Obito called out suddenly as he stared down at his hands, "are you afraid?"

"Of what?" She could feel her skin crawling, she remembered how this went once, she knew, she knew.

"Are you afraid of dying?" He asked and she could almost taste her disappointment, her tongue running over the backs of her teeth as she remembered the quiet voice of another.

_You know how all of this will end._

"No."

"What, why not?"

"It is the only thing we know for sure, isn't it?" She doesn't really know when Roku became Kyoko, or was it that Kyoko became Roku? She wasn't sure, she wasn't sure where the edges of the mask were or if it was Roku that was the mask now but she knew one of them died at some point.

_Don't be coy_

"We have no idea what will happen when we die, it literally is one of the biggest mysteries."

"That is irrelevant, what happens after death is simply semantics. What matters is that we all will die one day, maybe tomorrow, maybe in a month, or maybe it will be years from now." She sighed watching his brow pinched in confusion, "You are born, you live, then you die. Every living thing adheres to it, as shinobi we witness it more often than not."

"I don't want to die."

"Is that what your little temper tantrum was about?" she asked as she cleared the distance between them, "Silly, silly Obito, as long as I live I will do what I can to make sure you don't die." She reached forward to force his cheeks upward into a smile, "Problem solved."

His eyes were wide and searching as tears began to fill them once again and the smile she imposed onto him no longer was forced. He laughed as he darted forward crushing her in a tight hug that lifted her off the ground, "As long as I live I will not let you die either Kyoko!"

"And Kakashi, we are a team and he is ours to protect." She huffed against his shoulder, her eyes closing involuntarily.

"Oh fine, and Kakashi."

"It's a promise then."

"You are the one that gets to tell him."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they are bonding, how cute.


	5. Agony

Kyoko disliked poetry.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say she never really liked poets themselves. Poets, writers, artists, they all tended to obsess with death to some degree. There was even a genre of poetry centered on death called Jisei, Jisei-ei, the dead living between the letters of words written. A romanization of a cruel reality, like magpies picking the prettiest bits of a whole to surround themselves in, chattering on and on in some cacophony of noise that no one truly cared to hear.

She refused to look at him, even his shadow reminded her of the other one.

She disliked poets primarily because they reveled in misfortune, they lived for it in a way she never could understand. Dead is dead and there is nothing to say or do for it. Death is death and there is no honor or beauty in it, it is simply an end, it was never waking up.

"There is a difference between classes, especially with civilians. It is something bone deep, in how they carry themselves and how they think. It is imperative for you to capture that if you are to accurately depict anyone of high standing." She began tapping her fingers on the tea set, something inside her itching to drop just a bit of poison if only to get him to stop, "As a male, you have things a bit easier, fewer things you have to remember. More likely to get away with what they would consider eccentric."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Stop the questions, stop the confrontation. She wished she could pretend she didn't know what he meant.

"It wouldn't have made a difference."

"You wouldn't know now," his hands were tucked in his lap, unmoving, "would you?"

She felt herself sinking, her heart dropping, her skin crawling. All she could do was stare, wide-eyed and blank at the little boy now ashen like her, dusted like the man who made them. It was the first time their eyes had met for a long time and now she couldn't look away. There was no silver lining, no way to make the rotting corpse lying in their memories any prettier or nicer to look at, the ink on her tongue was toxic.

"I hate you."

She couldn't help but wonder if this reaction, like the intrinsic need to eject sickness from the body, was because of him or because of her. A specter haunting her, the other side of the mirror.

"What is it like?" Truly it was because of her, ghosts were not real and the dead were dead, she was the only one left dying here.

"What?"

"To hate something." And there was no excuse really, for it was her as much as everything in her life had always been her. She was herself and there was no removing that from the equation, a part of a whole but still here.

A part of a whole, necrotic and festering.

"It hurts."

She blinked slowly, her lips twitch upward and her eyes, finally, dropped to their tea cups, half full and cold against the back of her throat.

"No matter what, never let that go."

Even as she saw no beauty in the dead like the poets she so disliked, she couldn't help but find that there is something truly beautiful in the suffering of life. For if there was no beauty in the unlucky then there would be no beauty anywhere at all.

She has always thought that the world was beautiful and alive and so very, very, unlucky.

Hypocritically she was obsessed with life like a poet was obsessed with death, and it was the same. It was the same and she was burning in her own damnation.

" _Why are you a shinobi?" She traced the spider webbed scars on the ground with muddied fingers, her muscle jumping minutely in shock as she instinctively brought up another earth wall to block Kakashi's next attack. They had been training for a while now, their chakra sluggish with exhaustion, slow to react._

" _Why are you asking?" His sandal met her forearm and she twisted, dropping to catch herself and pivot hard enough to hook and throw him with a rigid leg._

" _Minato-sensei asked me once what my dream was, I am curious if being a shinobi has been yours or if it is something more." They separated and she carefully laid an area affect genjutsu out as she turned the area around them into a marsh, intertwine the two Jutsu to mask one under the other. Lightning sparked across the water as he leaped to higher ground watching her own flickering image appear in the canopy as well before he lost his footing on a branch that wasn't there. He caught himself from falling into the water he just charged, there was silence for a moment as they both hid, planning their next move._

_He found her and shattered the tree branch she had been crouched on, his blade trailing static. "My dream is to be the best."_

" _Is that all?" The blood was annoying, the complete inability to move her face in the area around the cut was even more so._

" _What do you mean is that all?" They stared at one another, Kakashi's deadpan stare slowly growing blanker the longer the inaction drew out, like a wind-up doll coming to the end of the energy its clockwork motor could store._

" _I have found that many people's dreams seem almost unattainable, yours seems somewhat mundane, doesn't it?"_

" _I'm not stupid like Obito, besides if you find my dream so boring what is yours?" He sighed tilting his head absently._

" _I don't suppose I have one." Kyoko tensed as she watched the telltale signs of Kakashi's next attack, after being a part of his team so long, the spar was more like a performance than a fight._

_More a dance than a battle._

" _And you are calling me mundane?"_

" _Can my dream be to someday have a dream?"_

" _Then you have a dream and the entire notion is rendered useless." He paused narrowing his eyes at her for a moment as if baffled, "Like this conversation."_

_And she was falling, her arms stinging from the punch she blocked. She landed gracelessly in the marsh she created, mud splashing up around her, the gleam of the sun blinding as it stared down at her from over Kakashi's shoulder._

" _Oh," she tilted her head before glancing down at her own hands, "I suppose you are right."_

_Her clone grabbed his ankles from her hiding spot and pulled him into the earth._

There is a certain strain one feels on the mind as a shinobi, she had never noticed it herself but she reads about it. This strain can manifest in so many ways, in new hobbies, in aggression, in loud boisterous attitudes, in cold indifference, in isolation, in obsession.

"Obito?" she called out to him as she laid sprawled out on her back in the training field grass. The clouds were dark, it may very well rain.

These different reactions to the same problem is the very reason that she never really understood why people were chosen to be Kintsugi, they were such a brittle unpredictable medium. Even when one controls all other variables there are still too many possible reactions to make any sort of art worth the effort to make what is, ultimately, a defective model.

"Yeah?" He huffed as he did laps around the perimeter, the weights around his legs stark against his pants.

She thinks that is what she finds so disagreeable with it all. How utterly wasteful the whole endeavor is. She can't help to admire its brilliance, however, for it really is a rather fantastic idea in abstract. Erase the emotions, keep the body, give it skill, and one has a perfect weapon with its own self-destruct button to be used at the maker's leisure.

"What is love?" She heard him trip and the string of cursing that followed it.

"What?" He sounded rather like a dying bird, loud and frantic, "Do you have a crush or something? How cute!"

It was simply business in the end, it wasn't art, it wasn't personal.

"No, I just don't understand?"

"Oh, I mean everyone gets love, don't they? Like you love your family and stuff."

It was like being born dead, like never existing at all. That was the thing though, wasn't it? There is no such thing as the living dead. She was very much alive and yet she had been distorted so much that she couldn't function correctly. Couldn't understand something that everyone else instinctually understood.

"What does it feel like?"

"I don't know?"

"Contradiction."

"Shut up, it's just love, okay?" She turned to stare blankly at him. "I guess it is something that makes you happy, it makes everything worth it. If you love someone or something you would willingly do anything for them and try your best to be around them."

That inability made her defective, wrong, because if you could not relate enough to predict your enemy you were doomed to fail.

"Do I love you and Kakashi?"

"How should I know?"

"Ah."

She wasn't sure if what she felt for her teammates was love, she certainly didn't love herself so she was pretty sure she didn't love them. She and They were the same thing, after all, emotions mattered little. Is that it though, emotions. Emotion as a concept confused her, the complexity and subtle nuances a maze she found herself lost in.

She was too tired to try to find her way out.

"Do you love us?"

"You and Kakashi? I mean, you guys are my teammates and I'm stuck with you so I guess you are okay. I like you alright that is for sure. I definitely don't love Kakashi, he is a jerk, but I probably love you like a cousin or something."

"Isn't it generally accepted that you love your cousins whether they are jerks or not?"

"Nah, that is more of a sibling thing."

"Oh," she sighed through her nose, her lips pressed tightly together, "Do you love Konoha?"

"Of course, Konohagaru is my village and more than that, this is my home."

" _Why don't we run away?" Ku whispered into the dark of their room._

" _They will find us."_

" _You don't make loyal soldiers with fear."_

_She was restless, she often was these days._

" _And yet here we are."_

" _And yet" she opened her mouth and released her drive with a gust of air, "here were are."_

In all honesty, she never intended to fall in love with the world above the earth. It wasn't the village itself, for as long as she could hear and feel the thrum of life around her the world didn't seem so heavy. She didn't feel like the sky was trying to crush her, like her skin wasn't crawling over her bones and the stench of sulfur and burning bones clinging. She never expected even be able to identify the feeling, and she couldn't really but she didn't know what else to call it. It was sacred, her hallowed ground. She was content there in the deafening clatter of village life she stood amongst those bartering for food and clothing, and everything in-between.

It was home.

She stayed there long past her team meeting, a mild genjutsu keeping those around her from noticing. She stood and stared and lived as the sun rose behind her back and rested above her. The crowd had thinned when he found her waiting for him to find her there among the civilians and she smiled her stiff empty smile.

She smiled and she showed him her cracked and flaking lacquer, the ink on her tongue stark, prominent.

She didn't expect the panic on his face or to be whisked away in a flash of gold.

_"Will you call me Ku?"_

_"Is that your name?"_

_"Does it matter?"_

" _Why would I call you by something that wasn't your name?"_

" _You call me Kyoko, don't you?"_

" _I know Kyoko, not Ku."_

" _I see." It felt strangely like rejection._

" _Tell me what you can?"_

_She was silent for a long time, the loose papers around her fluttering with each turn of her teacher's fan._

" _Did you know it's grass, Secale cereale, that has the longest roots? The thing about grass is that you will never find a single blade alone. Grass live and die together." She felt like she was drowning in the blue of his eyes, "Grass is somewhat self-sabotaging in the face of a predator."_

Nothing changed.

He knew she knew and she knew he knew, the subtext may have changed but the outcome remained the same. She was still stuck, her lacquer still pulling at the edges, nothing changed. The leaves still refused to turn red and brown, refused to fall around the village heralding the snow they knew would come.

Nothing changed.

Dying, decaying, dead, Kyoko endured.

" _Will it ever get easier?" Shi's hand hovered uselessly in the air, over the spot he knew his other should be._

" _Yes." Roku responded, and in a way she wasn't lying._

_Eventually, you get used to the pain. It stays like that until suddenly it just isn't enough anymore._

"I'm not late!" a figure slammed through the underbrush skidding across the ground before Kyoko lifted a foot to stop their momentum.

"Liar, you are late." Kakashi growled his eyes narrowing and his arms tensing in their crossed position, "What time did you think we were supposed to meet? You are a Ninja, there are regulations in place for a reason, follow them!"

"I had to help an old lady carry some things, calm down."

"What? That's a lie, again!"

"It doesn't matter, either way, Obito helped the old lady and is here now." Minato interrupted smiling sheepishly.

"Pushover." Kakashi snapped looking to Kyoko for assistance, she stared blankly in response. "Ninja who does not follow the rules are trash."

"Ah, I am sure he didn't mean anything bad by it." A nervous voice interrupted the two from their fight, her stance already wavering.

"Who's that?" Obito finally stood squinting at the unknown medic-nin.

"Are you stupid?" Kakashi sighed turning on his heel to begin the mission.

"What? Excuse me for not knowing some random person?"

"You are excused." Kyoko nodded falling into step with Kakashi.

"Not you too Kyoko!"

The fields of the land of grass spread out before them as they continued northwest, a storm brewing at their back. Kyoko listened with only half an ear to her team as Minato explaining the mission to Obito. She had already read the scroll and understood that Minato would not be a part of their team and that Kakashi would be their team leader while they completed a mission of their own. The little medic-nin they had with them was a temporary member of their team, they were very combat heavy and the mission may call for medical assistance.

They were to destroy the Kannabi Bridge this would eliminate the enemies' means to receive supplies.

It was a simple mission, stealth was one of her expertise. The bridge was to be destroyed. They knew, they knew what to do, still she could feel ice creeping into her veins.

They entered the forest so unlike their own and held formation, the hairs on the back of Kyoko's neck standing on end. She watched as Kakashi called for them to be halt, her eyes turning to Minato. She knew what this meant, could practically smell the metallic stench of the blood that was to be spilled. And yet instead she watched as Kakashi fell to his own pride. Her Kunai dragging smoke through the air as she destroyed a clone, her eyes barely kept track of her teacher's shunshin as he flickered out of view listening to his command to return to camp. Her bones ached with an age she did not have, Kakashi and Obito bickered, the medic doing what she can to heal their minor injuries.

She felt wooden.

"Why did you use an incomplete Jutsu in the middle of battle?" She interrupted Minato, he had been speaking to them about their performance. She hadn't meant to say that, she didn't turn her gaze away from the forest.

"What?"

She was silent for a moment, she could feel the bite of her own nails against the palm of her hand. "You have not trained yourself to be able to handle the speed of your own Jutsu, and yet you still put not only yourself at risk but myself, Obito, and the medic-nin you have never worked with. There is also the fact that you used an unknown Jutsu in a battle that did not require it, what if one of us had gotten in your way?" she glanced down at her hands, "Do you really think you could have stopped?"

"It would have been your own fault if you got in my way!"

"Fault has little to do with it," She sighed finally turning to glance over Kakashi, "The question is if you could live with yourself."

She knew her answer, she hoped he would never know his.

"Now, now, Kyoko," Minato said to pacify the situation, "that is a bit harsh. Yes, Kakashi should not have used an incomplete Jutsu like that when he can't even see his own enemy's counters but the mistake is understandable." He paused narrowing his eyes, "and will not happen again."

She hummed dismissively turning her gaze back to the forest around them.

"Before I leave you four, I will say what I have told you over and over again. The most important thing is that you all work together."

In the silence they rested through the night, breaking through the forest at first light, ghosting their way through the land of grass, over trees, tapping feet on branches and shoulders brushing through bamboo forests. Minato separated from them and they pushed forward, their eyes wide and watching.

"Kyoko, you are both a sensory ninja and the best we have at stealth," Kakashi began as they paused long enough to orientate themselves, "Scout ahead and report back to us every few hours until we reach the bridge. Stay and observe until we catch up then."

"And if you are engaged?"

"Interfere only if you think we need assistance."

She nodded "Then I will head out now, please wait five minutes before pursuing." It was easy enough to change her gate, shifting from the stride of a Chūnin to that of a Root agent. Undetected she slid through the shadows, eyes sharp with part of her attention held by the team at her back.

She disliked this mission, it wasn't that it was hard, she had done worse. She disliked this mission for the way it brought to attention how their lacquer was pulling, how she clung so desperately to her two other parts and yet one was still falling away. She could understand the problem, all the pieces had their own weight and material, it was no wonder they struggled to stay together. Still, she didn't want to go back to being incomplete, she had just filled in all the missing pieces.

Oh, she could feel the bite of failure already.

Kakashi was growing tired of it, the placidity of it all. He was a war hound, a dog bred for bloody teeth and fallen enemies. She understood well enough, she had been manufactured for war herself, after all. The only difference between them is that she was only as deadly as the hand that held her and Kakashi? Kakashi would always be a dog howling in time with the strike of a kunai, fingers itching for movement and action like the static in his veins.

Her thoughts were interrupted as she felt a shift in Obito and Kakashi's chakra, a second look coming up empty for the medic-nin. The other two pieces came apart, Obito's chakra signature turning off course while Kakashi's remained stationary. Kyoko frowned, her heels digging into the dirt as she stopped as well, turning to stare sightlessly behind her. She stood in silence simply staring for the longest time, barely breathing, before she made her decision.

It took her six minutes to reach Kakashi, she paused and they stared and stared and stared and then she left him. She easily tracked Obito's inferno of chakra and was unsurprised when she felt a cold spark at her back. It took them another four minutes traveling at top speed to reach Obito, Kakashi intercepting the attack that would have killed their teammate as she made for the enemy's throat missing only by a hair as he dodged. It was fine, even with the missed opportunity of eliminating the danger she still injured him, the poison on her blade would kill him in a few hours if nothing else.

"Silver hair and a white chakra blade?" The enemy coughed faintly tilting his head to regard Kakashi as Kyoko crouched in between them, "Konoha's White Fang?"

"This is a memento of my Father." Kakashi responded absently as he shifted to accommodate his old wound.

She never understood why people took the time to talk while battling.

"The white fang's brat? There's no need to worry then." He sneered, the chill of his chakra muffling itself as he faded from all of Kyoko's senses. It was unnerving, even in death chakra still lingered so the sudden absence of another's was mildly horrifying.

"Obito, behind you!" She turned in just enough time to see blood arching above them, a cut sliding over the entirety of Kakashi's left eye. The sound of Kakashi's scream set her teeth on edge, something inside of her grinding against nerves.

"Are you alright?" Obito's panic was contagious, she barely managed to keep herself still as she searched for any sign of the enemy.

"I'm fine." Kakashi's hand hovered over his injured eye as the other darted around, "Dirt in your eyes again, Obito? Come on, Shinobi don't cry. Besides, I'm not dead yet." He paused glancing over to Kyoko, "Did you notice anything?"

"He doesn't even leave a chakra trail."

"He's skilled then, he even got rid of the kunai with my blood on it. Be on your guard." The splatter of blood punctuated his sentence, Obito's Sharingan blazing, two tomoe spinning, the enemy impaled on his blade.

The silence was heavy between them.

"Congratulations I suppose." Kyoko felt like she was drowning, every limb felt like she was moving through water, it was too much.

They quickly patched up Kakashi's eye and turn to the cave interrupting the other enemy within.

"Her chakra is irregular, I think he has her in a genjutsu."

"From what I have sensed before her chakra is moving in a pattern similar to a level three genjutsu, likely for information gathering purposes if the pooling in her throat and crown gateways are to be trusted." Kyoko filled in the gaps for Obito for future use.

"Let's make this quick then."

Three moved in sync, all parts of the same whole working in tandem as they attacked, the enemy exploding into smoke as he replaced himself with a nearby rock that Kyoko's Kunai slide through easily. Kakashi released the medic-nin and Kyoko pursued the enemy just as he finished a sign sequence.

And then the cave began to fall around them.

She could hear Kakashi's command for them to get out and she listened attempting to create a few earth columns to at least slow down the mountains decent on her team. She stared wide eyed as Kakashi fell, her heart thundering in her chest as she watched Obito pick him up and throw him, her fingers brushing the others as she attempted to grab his hand.

Only she was too late.

Under the rubble lied Obito Uchiha. Under a mountain, buried alive was the boy with eyes redder than the blood on his skin. It was the second time she witnessed the birth of a river of blood, the second time a mountain rested on the backs of her comrades. She could feel herself breaking, the air in her lungs quaking, her heart choking her with every beat. She barely heard Kakashi's words, her finger clumsily running through a Jutsu only to be stopped by the medic-nin. She barely understood the words spoken to her, something about how he would only be in more pain, crush-syndrome, the medic's hands were too hot, the world was cotton, and she was underwater again.

"It looks like the end for me, huh guys?"

She felt herself screaming in the silence, her mouth wide like her eyes and just as empty. She couldn't get the words out past her throat, she didn't even know what she wanted to say. She couldn't hear Kakashi, hyper aware of every shuttering breath Obito made, every twitch and spasm she could see, committing the smile he wore for them to memory.

"I was the only one who didn't give you a present at your Jonin graduation." The words were halting, excruciating to hear as his skin snagged on the rock, pulling strangely with each movement he made.

"It's a good thing I came up with something then, yeah? You are a great Jonin, Kakashi, I would be honored if you would except my eye as my teammate and friend. I'm already going to die, but this way I can become your eye and from now on see the future with you."

It was cruel, it was cruel, they had just found out how they fit together.

"Please?"

_They stood opposite one another, their faces inches apart as they held themselves still, barely breathing._

" _When I die turn one of my leg bones into a knife." Ro whispered, she knew what was to come._

" _Why? Besides, we both know it is me who will die."_

" _I would still be protecting you that way, wouldn't I?"_

" _That's not how it works."_

" _Does it matter?"_

_The clone dispersed leaving Kyoko alone, she didn't know why she did this._

_It didn't matter._

"Are you," her voice broke cutting her off as she forced herself to blink, "Are you afraid?"

"Terrified." And yet he smiled.

"They say koi become dragons when they swim up the waterfall." Kyoko could feel her words echo around her. "Was it a hard journey?"

He didn't respond to her this time.

It was wrong, she could still smell the stench of burning bones, smoldering near her with a deafening crack. It was unfair, her skin itched with the ash. She stared and stared and stared as the medic took Obito's eye and gave it to Kakashi, 'no,' she tried to say as the pieces fell apart, 'we can fix this.' She could feel the rage boiling from Kakashi and all she could do was stare, Obito was too still.

Jisei.

She couldn't feel her heartbeat, it was raining.

"Hey, Obito?" She whispered, the sounds of battle at her back, "Why couldn't you leave the turtle behind?" She knew so little in this world above the roots and now she knew even less, broken without the third part that made them whole.

" _Agent Roku, complete protocol."_

Her fingers flickered through a Jutsu she wished would have never had to use again.

She thought of the flames that would roar so near her, too hot in the wake of the chill that settled over her like a thin layer of ice red like his twice cursed pinwheeled eyes. This time, she imagined, it would be the stench of melting plastic and burning hair that she would remember, the way his ash spread across her skin.

She couldn't do it.

_She did as she was told, she always did as she was told._

Not again, never again.

She stared and stared and stared at the gaping hole where his eyes should be, she couldn't move.

Three became two, the silence between them was still, she felt glacial.

They completed their mission, their sensei watched them with tired eyes, a name unspoken on his lips. In the space between them she grieved, she grieved for the death of the boy with a desperate hope, a boy from a clan cursed.

In the space between them she drowned in the downpour.

_The storms from her dreams shook the oceans of her waking world, the sky above her trembled._

* * *


	6. Familiarity

There is very little Kyoko has and even less that she can claim.

It's easier to exist outside your own actions, she wished she had the forethought to begin the separation early like she knows so many others did. Existence in and of itself was questionable and in it they all survived differently, they found their own niches with their own caveats, made their deals and lived their lives. They signed their contract and didn't look back.

That's the problem, though. Kyoko always looked back.

_Their fingers were intertwined, they were four or three or five and their fingers were intertwined. They couldn't tell who was who as they stared down at their hands, it didn't really matter, they were the same after all._

_The air in-between them was cold._

From the beginning they were together, until they weren't. Born together, mirror images of one another, tiny hands held and eyes unfocused, then one died. Two fell apart, one prevailed, and then there was one. In the shadows one festered, in the shadows one fell, and in the shadows one was picked up and placed among two others. One became three, awkward and precarious they lived. The three listened and in the silence between them they heard a cry one remembered, the sort of a desperate scream you hear from the mouths of dying men _._ And then three became two and the two pieces stared blankly at one another, neither together nor apart.

The words unspoken were deafening, the words unspoken would never leave their mouths, their throats, they would be pushed and pushed and pushed until they no longer existed at all.

They didn't mind.

Sometimes, in Kintsugi, the break is a bit too large. Sometimes you can't fix the bowl with just a little bit of lacquer and some gold. Originally, they were all scattered pieces, each a different piece of pottery, each another lost. They fit together strangely, but still, they fit and the bowl became a cup or plate or something no one had ever seen before. And then they broke again.

They say that in those gaps and holes where the lacquer just isn't enough, light rushes in to fill you. Enlightenment, they call it. There is a hole now, in-between them, inside of them. Where is their enlightenment? What good is the optimism of imperfection when all they could feel was the absence of fire in their life.

Dukkha.

There was a monk once, maybe before, maybe after, maybe he didn't exist at all. He spoke of the three marks of existence; Anicca, Dukkha, Anattā. Anicca, impermanence, the constant change and movement of life. She didn't pretend to understand them, to comprehend the beliefs of others when a belief in anything was not something she had ever had.

Dukkha is suffering, it is everything that can and will go wrong, it is grief and pain and everything unpleasant in life.

Kyoko had been tired for such a long time.

" _Promise me something?"_

" _What?" Ku asked, tilting her head back to look at her sister._

_Ro placed the severed head of their target down onto the scroll and sealed it safely inside the matrix for identification later. "Never leave me alone."_

" _And if I do?" Ku rolled onto her stomach precariously, as to right the world, her gaze remaining steadily on her sister._

" _I don't know."_

" _Yeah, okay." They both knew what Ro really meant, neither could really fathom a world without the other but knew it would eventually come._

" _Do you promise?" Ro broke the silence, insisting on an answer._

" _No."_

_They both knew why._

'Anattā' the monk probably said with a voice she thought she might have remembered once, 'there is, in us, no permanence. There is no underlying substance that you can call a soul.'

In its own way, it was comforting.

_Shi dug his fingers into the sides of her neck, his eyes narrowed, face blank. She knew what she had been trying to accomplish with their spar, she knew and yet wasn't surprised to be faced with disappointment._

" _Hate seems like a rather weak emotion, doesn't it?" Her words startled Shi, his hands jerking back as if her skin had burned him, she slid down the wall without his support._

" _As compared to what, indifference?"_

" _And yet it is you who hesitates."_

She was there again beneath the Hashirama trees, she was always there somehow, hiding away like a coward. It was never claimed that she was anything but one, a coward, a fake, a doll and really it didn't matter. There was so very little that mattered anymore, after all.

Water fell from the leaves above her, dripping and dropping onto the same spot on her head it had been for the last hour as she rested on her knees among the roots.

They say that the world is filled with music and that every person who has ever lived dances to that music. They say that there are some who are just a bit off, that these people can't hear the music. They can hear and see everyone dancing and talking, and they can mimic the moves at the right time, say all the right things but it isn't real. They can pretend, but they will never be able to hear the music and so when it stops they will be the only ones left dancing.

Roku never stopped dancing, Kyoko has always stopped a beat too late, and now there was just a confused little girl alone in a forest.

" _Do you know why the cricket sings?"_

Sometimes, most of the time, everyone else who could hear the music thought those who kept dancing were special. They thought that those who could hear the music were somehow wrong, that they were the ones missing something. Sometimes they see the others still dancing and think that they are amazing to be so off script, so strange and foreign, so wrong.

And those that think this praise the others for it, they call them geniuses, brilliant, but that doesn't change that these dancers are broken.

They were broken, they were a gaping hole that nothing can fill, a void larger than the universe, polite smiles and small talk in the market place where no one cares but everyone still goes through the motions anyways. They dance and they smile, the edges of their sight fading and their body moving on its own as they stare baffled from behind their own eyes.

" _Crickets chirp."_

" _Oh, come on, I'm trying to be all metaphorical and mysterious like you always are."_

They could use all the lacquer they wanted, gold and silver and copper. They could find all the people, the art, the blood, the war, and try to make themselves whole but they would always be empty. Empty and ugly and wrong. There was no changing it, there was simply nothing to fix, nothing to heal or put right because these people were born defective.

She was born defective.

And what is there to fix when this is all they have ever been?

" _Fine."_

" _Wait, what? Really?"_

" _Why does a cricket sing, Obito?"_

She wished she wasn't, that there was just something a little bit more she could do. God, she was trying so hard, and yet all she did was dig up more failure. All she did was make the hole a little deeper. So, standing at the bottom of her own desolation she danced.

" _Oh!" His smile was blinding, "Hope! Every night the crickets gather and sing for the sun they know had fallen, they hope their songs will be enough to bring it back every morning."_

_They were silent, they had decided to get dinner that night after returning from training. It was something of a tradition for the two of them to eat out at least once a week together, each time at a different restaurant, missions permitting of course._

" _What do you sing for Kyoko?"_

She didn't particularly know how long she sat there, maybe it was all day, maybe a few days, maybe an hour or two. Her legs were numb, she couldn't convince her body to move. And she knew, she knew what role she now played and she couldn't find it in her to care. For if it were true, and she knew it was, her use would soon come to an end.

_She had chosen something reminiscent of spicy curry, she always seemed to get something similar every place they went. Obito used to tease her about it, saying there was no point to be going to so many different places when she was just going to get the same thing._

" _To drink tea."_

_Obito always got something different and this time he had chosen something their serve swore was from Wind country even if out of all the times she had been there she had never seen anything like that. He waved her off when she pointed it out._

" _What? That doesn't make any sense."_

" _I sing to be able to sit down when I'm old and decrepit, with you and Kakashi and talk about simple things like the weather and the woman down the street that keeps overpricing her cabbage."_

" _That's oddly specific."_

_He pushed his barely eaten food away and started stealing from hers like he always did._

" _Still," she sighed in defeat as he ate over half her bowl, "it is why I sing."_

She didn't have her own marks of existence like the monk that she may or may not have met, and maybe that is why Kyoko struggled to justify herself. Not her actions, she understood those well enough, but the fact that she was living. That everything was real and not just someone else's fever dream.

It didn't really matter.

There is, after all, very little use for a broken bowl, even less for that which was unfinished and half made. She was a shard of what she could have been, it was over and little else anyone did would fix that. There was simply nothing left to justify.

She could only be used as a crude weapon at best.

It's was fine. She was tired, after all, and all weapon eventually break.

She wasn't sure when she ended up here, one moment she was in Konoha's forest, the next she was surrounded by mist shinobi.

Kyoko had next to no recollection of the two very distinct seals on her, one over her heart the other over the chakra gate at her naval. It was easy to understand what they did, how they manipulated her, how unstable they were by the way the foreign charka wavered on her skin. It was nothing new to bear the weight of a seal.

It was nothing new but, oh, how it burned.

It was easy to feel the acrid burn of a tailed beast waiting behind the script on her skin, an ache of emptiness, of starvation and rage. It was so loud and demanding she almost didn't notice when he came. And he had come, he had come to try and save her when there was nothing left to save.

She already knew what to do.

"Come now, it is time," She could almost laugh, he rather looked like a cloud bearing too much in that moment, "look away."

He knew what had to be done, she could never let him dirty his hand like that. Like her.

"What? What are you doing?" Kakashi had always been smarter than this, she knew he knew, he knew she knew. They were silent, they were silent and the eye that was not his own spin.

"Ah, before I go please do one thing for me."

The others around them were restless. Was it raining? Her face was wet.

In that moment, she could remember a room, she could taste the dust in the air and feel the dirt in her hair. She could remember standing opposite one, a reflection of another with dark eyes, pale face, and hair the color dried blood. One was so very sweet, soft, kind the other sharp, cold, refined.

One was already ruined.

_It has always been a marvel; how easy it is to kill._

It could never be said for sure who died in that room. Did the survivor grieve for her own death or the death of another? Who knows, who knows, but what she wouldn't give to be among the crowds again.

For once the silence was deafening.

" _Roku?" Shi was confused, the rock with a carved frog bounced lightly on his chest._

" _It's only right for the scorpion to carry the frog, even if it's only this once, don't you think?" She wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh, she felt like she should, "One scorpion to another, of course."_

It didn't really matter in the end. The test was over, two had become one and it was time again for a future to be retold.

" _Ro?" a voice whispered in the dark, a hum responded._

" _Are you scared yet?" there was a click and the shadows retreaded to the edge of the room, alone Kyoko stared at her own hand in her apartment._

" _I wish I knew how to be."_

" _Would it change anything if you were?"_

" _I don't know."_

Those under the never changing Hashirama trees taught her humility, elegance. They taught her how to lie, to break, to poison and kill and endure. They watched on as she armed herself with Senbon, in precision and stealth, in the way the metal gleamed before it slid into another's throat. She was taught how to poison in every way, how to move and dance her way beside death moving to a song everyone but her could hear.

The roots taught her everything that made her Roku, but it was the leaves that taught her how to live. The leaves were the ones who taught her about others, the ones who showed her love and understanding even when she had none to offer. They taught her how to breathe, what it felt like to turn your face to the sun, what it was like to fail. The leaves taught her how to be Kyoko.

"Live for us, we know there is more than this." She murmured to the boy with silver hair, repeating to words once said to her. Words she failed to complete, words she had never planned to even try to complete.

"I promise."

Her chakra flared, the first level of the seal on her tongue activating, then the second closed her throat, then with the third she smiled for the first time without the looming chill that seemed to have always been a part of her and two became one.

Two became one and I became We once again.


	7. Ubiquity

 

Death in and of itself is irrelevant. Life does and will go on, there is no real effect the absence of a single person or thing has in the world around it. If anything, death is where life puts what it no longer has a use for, a cosmic trashcan, 'pure lands' be damned. People look for God there, in the cosmic trashcan, as if this otherworldly being is waiting, wanting, to be found.

Like they care.

Evidently, they don't.

There is a God in the moon and she never cared. She stares with one giant eye, a monstrosity in the making, and every night little boys and girls look up at her with reverence. There are a series of deity that Konoha carved into stone, a line of demigods hidden in script on the skin of human sacrifices. They gave their village history and that was all the wished to give.

She was a side effect, part of the left-over filtered from soup to make it clear, useless and found wanting. She was no god, no wayward demigod, no innocent, just a dead girl dragged from her sleep.

She was a dead root, decomposing as fertilizer for the next generation, until she wasn't anymore.

_Oddly enough, it's like waking up._

The first few moments were reminiscent of the time she was in shock, the overload of chakra from a jutsu not her own. An awkward buzzing of confusion filled her ears, her eyes itched and her skin crawled, then it cleared and before her was an inferno she thought once dead, thrown in the trashcan where it seems it belonged.

"And who are you?" the dead girl said the dead boy, two pieces of litter found polluting the wilds.

"I'm surprised you don't already know," there was an expectant pause as if she would suddenly stop pretending, like she actually cared after witnessing what he had done. "I'm the koi that became a dragon."

And she knew, she could smell it in the air, the ash that painted her skin, the blinking signatures of life flickering out, the screams, the anguish, the blackened sludge crawling in her veins.

"I see no dragon here."

He flinched as if he was stuck and for a moment they just stood and stared. His fingers dug into his gloves in through the eye of his mask she saw the gleam of blood on a blade.

"Eliminate the enemy, Kyoko." Wooden and hollow, she was surprised at how much it hurt to hear his voice so broken.

"I think I prefer Roku," she lowered herself into a crouch, her stance solid and low, her nails digging into the earth as she poured pure elemental chakra through it, "you seem to have lost the right to call me anything but that, haven't you?"

There was no chakra she needed to save, nothing that she had to store to keep her heart beating, her body alive, and so with a force she never dared to use she tore a ravine into the soft dirt of Konoha, digging a mass grave for the world she once loved.

_The dog, the koi, and the root, what an odd team._

_They were standing back to back to back, an odd triangle with their shoulders at the point of connection. It was a war and they were fighting in it, their combined spine the only thing keeping them standing._

_Blood painted the green grass red, stained their skin, clung to their hair and clothes like a rotting perfume. They were young and tired and too small to be where they were._

_The dog was a streak of silver before death, a crack of thunder in the middle of the night. He was the meticulous, the methodical, the cold and clinical. The perfect solder in so many ways but never where it counted._

_The Koi, oddly enough was a flame that burned just a hint too bright. A scorching line of devastation, the open-mouthed hunger of a wildfire, he was perhaps the cruelest, with his hesitation, his passion._

_And the root? She left trenches where she ran, lines carved through dirt and stone only to fill like moats with the bodies of those she fell. Too many teeth, too little hesitation, she dances at the edge of their sight forever a phantom._

_Perhaps they were cursed, perhaps they never were real at all._

"Hello Kakashi," He looked exhausted already, "you've grown."

There was a boy to his right, black hair and blank eyes, she could almost taste the dirt of her birth on his skin from where she stood.

"Hello, Kyoko." He parried her Kunai, dropped to avoid the unseen wire that would have had his head, she almost smiled until a pulse of static froze her limbs. She could feel the cold touch of death lingering in her fingers and bones, she knew the answer to a question she had yet to speak.

Still she wished she was wrong.

"Have you kept your promise?" Her foot slammed down on the head of an ink summon, and the toes of her other foot caught, redirected, a projectile into the back of another shinobi. Her clone erupted from the ground and engaged with the boy as she rushed Kakashi, an avalanche, a landslide, she was the earth beneath his feet, the dust in his lungs.

"I don't break promises."

"Liar." They had that much in common she knew, and besides, he looked far too broken not to be one.

_She remained still, her head bowed, her mask blank and staring as her eyes traced lines that didn't exist._   _There are many horrible things that are done in the name of war, things she wished she never knew existed, things she wished she didn't have to do now that she felt more whole and complete than she had in so very long._

_But she did._

_She had to be the hideous thing hiding in the dark because if she wasn't then Obito might have to be, if she wasn't Kakashi might have to be. It was better her than them, she had to believe that, it was better her than them._

_She was so tired._

_It was always fire, in fire she died and after the fire she began, this was no different. They were the land of fire after all, their leader the fire's shadow, their pride the will of that fire. It was only fair that the weakest of their enemies succumb to it. Poetic even._

_Kyoko has always hated poetry._

_An Iwa base went up in flames that night, volcanic._

"Tell me, little root," with a flick of her wrist she tossed poison painted senbon at a figure vaguely familiar as he cut into her dance with Kakashi, "did you hold onto your hate?" the words felt stale, odd on her tongue like licking paper.

"Kind of," Shi grinned for a moment, an honest one that nearly blinded her and caused her to stumble, "but I don't think that hate was ever for you."

Maybe it was jealousy, maybe it was happiness, but something was bubbling in her chest as they stared at one another. She used the moment to cast out a thin web of chakra, one he easily broke. Her bones felt brittle, the dust and ash on her skin cracking as he landed a punch across her jaw.

"Danzo is dead." He continued, tapping his cheek absently watch her wearily from her sprawled position on the ground.

"Well," She tilted her head staring wide-eyed at him for a moment, before gesturing to the space around them "Look where that got you, I suppose."

_The flowers in Kyoko's hands felt heavy, the stems digging oddly into her hands causing them to itch. The grave before her was simple and well maintained, the ground around it weeded probably weekly. She wondered if they would bother for her body when she died, and if they did would it be as well maintained? Graves were not particularly commonplace during times of war, no one had the time or patience to dig a whole for a body that might not even house it, no one saw the point in wasting so much time. She doubted she would be more than carefully burned ash on the field, a body disposed of, so the enemy may not get to it._

_Rin Nohara was carefully etched into the stone, the straight letters stark against the smooth stone._

_Kyoko had never felt guilt for what she did to Rin, she still didn't. If she were to be honest she would even consider it a kindness that Kyoko had ended Rin's life early, something of a mercy killing. She supposed she was more here with Obito in mind than anything else, a nod to the relationship he had held with Rin._

_It was a flimsy excuse, but she was always rather good at lying to herself._

_She laid the flowers before the grave, two purple and one yellow Hyacinth with three white Camellia._

_Kyoko told herself she wouldn't come again, and yet two weeks later found herself before Rin flowers in hand._

No matter the instructions that whatever jutsu had forced her into life, she didn't really have the heart to kill anyone in the leaf. She killed those of cloud and sand, of mist and rock. She lost limbs and ran herself threw with blades pointed out to ward her off. It was reckless abandon she never had in life.

She only wanted to return, she wanted to return to before she knew of Kakashi's misery, Obito's betrayal. Return to a void that while was not her sister's arms or a quiet conversation about mundane life over tea it was so much better than this.

Kakashi and Obito were fighting, she could feel it in the flickering of their chakra, in the instant need to be at their side.

She never made it to them.

_Kyoko died finally for a second time under the heat of a jutsu cast by a boy as golden as her Sensei._

_Oddly enough, it's like falling asleep._

_She had enough will to stay dead this time._


End file.
